Let us introduce you to the goddess Sakhmet. She has the head of a lioness atop a woman’s body. Around her feline head, and forming a visual juncture to the human body, is a wig. She also wears jewelry: a large, beaded collar, as well as anklets and bracelets. Above her head is a large sun disc, representing Sakhmet’s association with the Sun God, who was her father.

Sakhmet was a particularly ferocious goddess; a bringer of violence, illness, and war. But in her outstretched fist, on her lap, she’s clutching an ankh, the symbol for life. Like many Egyptian deities, Sakhmet embodied a duality. While she had the power to bring illness and destruction, she also could offer health and restoration. In fact, Egyptian physicians saw the treatment of illness in part as a way to appease Sakhmet—and for that reason, physicians were usually priests of the goddess.

One pharaoh—Amenhotep the Third—commissioned over six hundred statues of Sakhmet for his mortuary temple. One theory of why he did this was in response to a series of epidemics that ravaged the Near East during his reign—either to ward them off, or to give thanks for being delivered from them.